#vrgtr

Domain: I’Cath Domain Formation: Unspecified (older lore: 732 BC) Power Level: 💀💀💀⚫⚫ Sources: Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft (5e)

Tsien Chiang’s history is vastly different in the good doctor’s latest guide than in previous accounts. Though she now rules a city of people instead of no one, these people do little more than toil away in a dream-scape of Tsien’s design as she does all in her power to ignore reality.

As a child, Tsien fled north into the mountains after her home was destroyed by an invading force. There she was discovered by a gold dragon who gave her shelter and in return, Tsien promised to serve him.

The dragon taught her the ways of magic and medicines, though withheld “dangerous” magics from her as she often spoke of avenging her family and reclaiming her people’s land and the dragon did not wish their pupil to resort to such violent vengeance.

Tsien, naturally, ignored such foolishness and secretly plotted her revenge. She discovered a spell to create the Nightingale Bell made from the scale of a gold dragon that would bring the ringer’s dreams into reality. Instead of asking her dragon mentor for a scale, Tsien decided to poison him and take a scale for herself. Tsien, however, was so inept in toxicology that the poison she created to place her mentor into a deep sleep killed him instead, leaving on a single golden scale behind. Convenient? Or yet another sign that our tormentors have more influence on our lives prior to them claiming us?

She brought the Nightingale Bell to her previous home and rang it, wishing for all the invaders to vanish, which they did in an instance. Awed by her power (well, more the power of the bell), the people made Tsien their Queen.

Tsien ruled for many years with the goal of creating the perfect empire. She was a stern and demanding ruler, which eventually took its toll (pun intended) on her people. Uprising occurred, which led to executions and more uprisings. Eventually assassins broke into her palace and slaughtered her four daughters. Tsien survived and rang the Nightingale Bell once more to seek her vengeance. Instead, the bell cracked and the Mists brought her into the land of I’Cath.

It’s unclear how things came to this point, but there are hints that Tsien was so wrapped up in her dreams of a perfect empire that she did not pay attention to the reality of her situation. Dwelling on dreams can be as dangerous as hope.

Within the Mists, I’Cath is a decaying city of starving people imprisoned within a ‘perfect’ dream. Tsien works on perfecting her dream by keeping her people in a deep, magical sleep brought on by the Nightingale Bell. Perhaps it is the dream versions of her daughters that keep her within this fake dream as she ignores the undead versions of her daughters that haunt the real city?

Darklord: Flimira ‘Flintlock’ Vhage Domain: Vhage Agency Power Level:  💀 ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ (1/5 Skulls) Source: van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft (5e)

The Vhage Agency is made up of a single, dull gray room, which resides entirely within the recesses of Flimira “Flintlock” Vhage’s own dull, gray mind.  Flimira is the Darklord of her own mind, though we are given precious few details about her past that resulted in her current torment.

According to the ‘good’ doctor, Flimira was once a detective who eventually became a criminal. Now she is cursed to receive requests to investigate occult mysteries through the Domains of Dread. Mysteries, she herself had a hand in creating. Still, she must dispatch detectives to clean up her own messes, ever hopeful that none of them will discover that she is, in one way or another, connected to every single case that comes their way.

Van Richten gives us no further details on Flimira and her Domain. If this report had come from my little scholar, I would have been severely disappointed as I am reduced to conjecture. Perhaps van Richten was attempting to be poetic and one must use deductive reasoning, much like a detective, to determine Flimira’s descent in her status as a Darklord?

The obvious conclusion one may draw from the scrapes of information provided is that Flimira was once a detective and through her work she made natural ties to the criminal elements she investigated. The nickname “Flintlock” gives the impressive of a hard and sturdy individual who does not open up to others easily. Perhaps years of detective work required her to keep far too many secrets and eventually she broke down, joining the criminal underground instead of working against it.

One potential course of events is that Flimira was much like Sherlock Holmes of the prime material plain and, working as a private investigator in a city, was relied upon by everyone to solve seemingly unsolvable cases using her keen intellect and deductive reasoning. Becoming famous for her ability to solve even the most baffling of mysteries, Flimira only accepted cases that she considered to be challenging. Through these cases she grew fascinated with the criminal elements behind them.

In time the puzzle of solving cases was not enough to keep her ever-churning mind satisfied and she began to orchestrate complex crimes of her own. Crimes, she felt with extreme arrogance, no one would ever solve. Naturally, these crimes of her own creations came back to her in the form of pleas for assistance. For who else could solve such crimes? Her protégée, Alanik Ray? Certainly not.

In order to cover her own tracks, Flimira was forced to investigate herself, which drove her calculating mind into a pit of despair. There is, after all, no challenge in discovering an answer to a question one already knows. So, Flimira retired, closing the door of her detective agency and fully throwing herself into the shady criminal underground.

Eventually, with the assistance of Alanik Ray, the local authorities discovered Flimira’s influence throughout the city. Disbelieving the possibility of someone beating her at her own game, Flimira convinced herself it was impossible and through use of hypnosis, convinced all of her former allies of the same. And as the last individual’s mind was altered by our former detective, the Mists came for her, pulling her into her own mind.

In the demiplanes of dreads, Flimira likely has the innate ability to cast ‘modify memories’ in order to keep her secrets and…in order to ensure that she must constantly send out others to investigate her own folly.